Election Afternoon 2024

Gorgeous day in Catonsville, headed for a near-record high. 

Perfect for walking the oblivious dog past the oblivious trees and flowers.

Volunteer chrysanthemum that popped up in the front steps. I'm going to try to transplant to the garden it once it is done blooming.

Interesting observation from Scott Siskind: 

Future generations will number American elections among history's greatest and most terrible spectacles. As we remember the Games in the Colosseum, or the bloody knives of Tenochtitlan, so they will remember us. That which other ages would relegate to a tasteful coronation or mercifully quick coup, we extend into an eighteen-month festival of madness.

Which reminds me of something I wrote about Carthaginian baby sacrifice:

The Carthaginians were not inhuman. They loved their children, and in our sparse sources we can glimpse the struggles they went through, their lapses, the years when times were good and the required sacrifices were forgotten. But then would come the disaster: a plague, a war, a terrible fire. The cry would go up that the Gods were angry, and parents would feel the sick sense of dread and impending loss. Who knows what motivated the ones who volunteered their babies? Perhaps they had already lost other children to disease, or their home towns had just been sacked and half their families snuffed out. Others faced the holy lottery, all of life in a concentrated moment: the worst fear, followed by either the most terrible loss or the greatest relief. They gambled with what they held dearest, and sometimes they lost. But don't we all? And doesn't the Carthaginians' acknowledgment of life's terror make their religion, in a sense, more honest than the sweet reason of modern Christianity, or the cool compassion of the Unitarians?

Sometimes, as I have said, I get the sense that humans are capable of only a certain amount of happiness. When things seem on the verge of getting too good, some of us feel compelled to insist that they are actually terrible and then blow the whole thing up.

I mean, have you ever wondered why people won't believe in the moon landings despite millions of pages of evidence? I think their imaginations just can't encompass something so amazing. If they believed that humans had walked on the moon they might have to believe that we – we as we are, not we after some world-wrenching revolution – are capable of making life really good.

I think we are.

Khaybar

Khaybar is an oasis in northwestern Saudi Arabia, about 150 kilometres (95 mi) north of Medina. It has been inhabited for thousands of years.

Khaybar is well known among Muslims because it appears in the Koran. A town there mainly occupied by Jews was attacked by Muhammad and his followers in 628 AD, an event traditionally called the Battle of Khaybar. Above is a depiction of the battle from a medieval Persian manuscript.

Various online sources, including wikipedia, say that legends about the Jews of Khaybar endured for a thousand years. Some stories said they retreated into the desert and waged a long-term struggle against Islam from a hidden fortress. According, again, to less-than-perfect online sources, some medieval Christian crusaders tried to contact these Jewish tribes as possible allies.

Online material about Khaybar falls mostly into two categories: posts by those interested in Islamic history, and posts from volcanologists. This part of the Arabian peninsula has been volcanically active for most of the past 2 million years, leaving a vast landscape of cinder cones, lava fields, and the like. The last volcanic eruption was in the 7th century AD. The hills on which the various forts and settlements around the oasis sit are all volcanic features, and until recent times one of the region's exports was grinding stones made from the local basalt.

According to local tour guides, some of the old stone houses that appear in tourist photos were occupied into the 1970s. When, one assumes, oil money allowed the residents to move to air-conditioned digs in Riyadh.

Khaybar made the news this week because of a major publication from French archaeologists who have been exploring the site for years (news story, original article). They call themselves the Khaybar Longue Durée Archaeological Project, with the acronym AFALULA-RCU-CNRS. They say that have documented a Bronze Age town at a site called al-Natah dating to around 2400 to 1500 BC.

Plan of the settlement. Notice that this town is walled on only one side. That is because the walls actually extended around the whole oasis, running a distance of 14.5 km and surrounding an area of 1100 hectares. There is even a term for this kind of site, the Walled Oasis, and this article mentions two others in this part of Arabia. Obviously that water was very much worth protecting, especially considering that there were only about 500 people living in this town.

Reconstruction. Our archaeologists write:

The nucleated dwellings were constructed following a standard plan and were connected by small streets. By comparison with neighboring oasis centers, we suggest that Northwestern Arabia during the Bronze Age−largely dominated by pastoral nomadic groups and already integrated into long-distance trade networks−was dotted with interconnected monumental walled oases centered around small fortified towns. 

The ratio between the large size of the walled area and the small town raises lots of questions. The archaeologists say there may have been Bronze Age camps within the walled area, although they can't be certain of this. What we should probably imagine is that each oasis belonged to a tribe most of whose members were nomadic, with the walled oasis as their refuge in times of drought or war. 

What a fascinating glimpse of a very different world.

Links 1 November 2024

Moche Vessel in the Form of a Toucan, Peru, 100 BC to 500 AD

New theory about the origin of the wheel and axle points to copper mines in the Carpathian Mountains. (original paper, news story)

Every year NFL players eat around 80,000 Uncrustables (frozen crustless peanut butter & jelly sandwiches). (NY Times)

Where are the 7 million men "missing" from the work force? Many of them are disabled, or claim to be.

Sabine Hossenfelder on a new paper describing shapes that tile the plane or fill 3-dimensional space but have rounded corners and curved edges, 6-minute video.

Anti-tourism protests in Spain.

The rise and decline of the secretary. Via Marginal Revolution. I am old enough to have had bosses who had secretaries, but not to have ever had one myself. For about a year in the early 90s I had a boss whose only career goal seemed to be to get her own secretary, which she never achieved.

Keeping Alberta rat free.

Renaissance books with pop-ups.

Remarkable hoard of coins dating to the Norman conquest of England – half showing Harold, half William the Conqueror, mostly dating to 1066-1068 – has been purchased via the Portable Antiquities Scheme and will go on display in the British Museum.

Heterodox Academy tracks ideological attacks on academics from both the left and the right, and they say right now attacks from the right greatly outnumber those from the left, a reversal of the situation in 2020.

And Heterodox Academy on Indiana's new "Open Inquiry" law, supposed to prevent indoctrination of students by their professors. They object to it for the same reason I objected to Florida's similar law, because there is no way for professors to know what statements might get them into trouble. Vague laws are bad laws. HA goes into this topic at greater depth in this piece on a proposed Federal bill, which they like much better than the Indiana and Florida laws. I am happy to have finally stumbled on some serious discussion of these issues.

On Twitter/X, Josh Marshall says that all the Trump operatives under 30 came out of 4chan and got their tone from online troll culture.

The planning and construction of Poundbury, (then) Prince Charles' dream of an old-fashioned English town, which now has 4,100 inhabitants. (20-minute video)

Interesting new Bronze Age hoard in Scotland.

Review of what sounds like an interesting book on medieval Christian mysticism.

Tweet compiling a bunch of articles complaining that Halloween isn't as fun as it used to be, stretching back to 1903.

Short history of the origins of civilization. Mentioning this mainly because it starts with an argument that agriculture appeared around the world in the Neolithic because changes in the earth's tilt and orbit led to greater seasonality, that is, bigger differences between summer and winter. I'm not convinced, but it is intriguing. Also notes that large-scale food storage, perhaps a response to seasonality, preceded agriculture. Then goes on to say stuff I think is wrong, like that farming made our health worse; it may have made disease worse, by raising our population density, but the other changes attributed here to poor diet could equally be caused by self-domestication.

From a new paper outlining the history of nepotism in European intellectual life, by tracing father-son pairs: "Most notably, nepotism sharply declined during the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, when departures from meritocracy arguably became both increasingly inefficient and socially intolerable." Via Marginal Revolution.

British study finds that children born during British sugar rationing in the 1950s had lower rates of diabetes and hypertension as adults.

Turning AI loose on a large collection of Renaissance astronomy books. Interesting idea but I don't think they really learned much.

Global culture watch: Afro-French NBA star Victor Wembenyama dresses up for American Halloween in a costume based on a Miyazaki movie.

Detailed NY Times write-up of the battle in Mali in which the Wagner Group lost 46 mercenaries, including the man behind the popular Grey Zone Telegram channel. Basically, they got cocky and were lured into a trap by Taureg rebels.

Ronald Reagan on Immigration

"You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German or a Turk or a Japanese. But anyone from any corner of the earth can come to live in America and become an American."

Video here. 

As I have said, I am willing to debate the practicalities of immigration, what number and what sort of people we should accept, but fundamentally I love this about my country.

A Note on American Careerism

Surveys lately have found that many Americans don't want to be promoted. It's a hard thing to measure, since nobody tracks how many people were offered promotion but turned it down, but I have seen several different results showing that around half of people would refuse promotion if they were offered it. We also had a couple of accidential experiments done when companies tried to bribe people to come back to the office: 

Take Dell, whose executives thought they came up with an ingenious plan to get everyone back into the office. If employees didn't come in at least three days a week, the company announced in February, they would be ineligible for a promotion. The response from Dell's workforce was a collective shrug. Months after the directive, nearly half of employees were still remote, apparently happy to remain in their current roles as long as they could keep working from home. It was a clear sign that in 2024, promotions just aren't the incentive they used to be.

I'm certainly in that situation; I never had any interest in further promotion once I became a principal investigator, that is, the lead scientist on my projects. When I have accepted management roles it was basically because there wasn't anyone else to do them. I tried for a couple of years to refuse raises – because in my business the more money you make, the less time you have to do technical work and the more you have to focus on management – but my boss waived off my objections, because she was worried that if we had a slowdown somebody would look around, see that this Bedell guy had been denied raises two years in a row, and decide to lay me off first. 

But the desire to climb the corporate ladder isn't exactly ancient:

The original work ethic in America — the Protestant one, espoused by the likes of Benjamin Franklin — dates from a time when most Americans were self-employed as farmers and artisans. It was rooted in a rugged individualism that was skeptical of authority and hierarchies, fitting for a country founded on the idea of freedom from tyranny.

That became a problem when the Industrial Revolution arrived. Companies exploded in size, and more and more Americans found themselves working for someone else. In 1820, 80% of the workforce was self-employed. By 1870, that share had shrunk to 33%. By 1940, it was 20%.

"The moral vision of American society had been based upon the image of the independent, self-employed person," writes Shoshana Zuboff, a professor emeritus at the Harvard Business School who has studied the history of work. "Many social critics feared that people would be less likely to work hard under the wage system and, even worse, that something in their very natures might change." America was facing an identity crisis.

The solution was to forge a whole new work ethic.

That is, the ethic of climbing the ladder. Which is also, of course, related to the decline in hereditary class distinctions and the rise of meritocracy, and to the growth of  huge bureaucracies like those in the Federal and state governments and mega-corporations.

None of the articles I have seen mention this, but I have to think that our ever-growing wealth also plays a role. In our society people like nurses and archaeologists can lead quite nice lives, with houses and yards and the internet and hundreds of tv channels. If you feel financially ok, why seek out a more stressful job?

Like millions of my contemporaries, I think medium chill is the happiest kind of life.

Susannah Clarke and the Strangeness of Creation

One thing all the world's cultures agree on is that the best poets are crazy. In many languages, the words for inspiration and madness are the same, or at least closely related. To be highly creative requires being in some sense different from other people, and our experience shows that being different in that sense often correlates with being different in many other senses as well.

In the NY Times this week, Alexandra Alter has a very interesting profile of Susannah Clarke. Clarke gets my vote for the most creative fantasy writer of the 21st century, and, yep, she's pretty crazy.

Clarke burst onto the scene with Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (2004), which sold 4 million copies and was widely proclaimed a truly great work of fantasy. I was ambivalent. On the one hand, it is full of wonders; one of my favorite bits describes ancient fairy roads that still run across northern England, now mostly abandoned and choked with trees and brush, never mentioned by the people who live nearby. The British tradition includes many stories about people who join fairy balls and don't return for a century; Clarke describes such a ball, conveying both the beauty of it and the unspeakable weariness of a party that never ends. I devoured these details, and transcribed half a dozen passages into my commonplace book. On the other hand, I disliked the plot and found one of the two main characters (Norrell) to be one of the most irritating people in the history of fiction. So I didn't love it like many others did, but I did recognize it as a remarkable achievement.

From the moment it appeared there were rumors that Clarke was working on a sequel, but somehow it never emerged. Most fans only learned years later what had happened:

Not long after the novel’s release, Clarke and her husband were having dinner with friends near their home in Derbyshire, England. In the middle of the meal, she felt nauseated and wobbly, got up from the table, and collapsed.

In the years that followed, she struggled to write. Her symptoms — migraines, exhaustion, sensitivity to light and fogginess — made working for sustained periods impossible. She wrote scattered fragments that never cohered; sometimes she couldn’t finish a single sentence. At a low point, she was bed-bound and mired in depression.

Clarke stopped thinking of herself as a writer.

“It became a problem of just not believing that I could write anymore. I just didn’t think it was possible,” said Clarke, who was later diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome. “I just thought of myself as this ill woman.”

Clarke eventually recovered enough to write seriously again, but she abandoned her first world and wrote something completely different instead. Piranesi (2020) is the story of a man trapped in a labyrinth with no end. Part of what traps him is the weak state of his own memory, his inability to recall who he used to be and how he became what he is. I loved it, read it straight through from beginning to end. But when you think about it, the story transparently springs from Clarke's experience with her mysterious illness, and Alter confirms this:

The philosophical puzzle at the story’s center reflected some of Clarke’s preoccupations: The narrator, Piranesi, lives largely alone with seabirds and stone figures, but instead of feeling lost or lonely, he sees the halls as a place of infinite wonders.

Clarke had nearly finished the novel before she saw the parallels between the fictional labyrinth and her illness.

“I was subliminally aware that I was writing about someone in a fairly isolated position, but who was able to find a huge amount of meaning in that,” she said.

Which is an amazing example of making lemonade from lemons. It also connects back to what may the second oldest trope about art, that it has roots in pain and suffering: the sadness of life is the joy of art. If Susannah Clarke's illness birthed Piranesi, doesn't that raise the question of whether her suffering was ultimately a bad thing?

Should artists have to suffer so the rest of us can read books like Piranesi, or enjoy paintings like the ones Van Gogh did in Arles?

But I want to get even broader than that. Alter finds that Clarke seems to be recovering from her illness, but she remains a strange person:

In her lap she held a stuffed pig, with a stuffed fox nestled beside her; both creatures play a role in “The Wood at Midwinter.” She likes to hold her stuffed animals when she’s working, to help her think, and as a talisman “to ward off, I don’t know what, something or other.”

“Some people do things as a child, and then when they grow up, they put off childish things,” she said. “I’m not very good at that.”

Glancing down at the pig, she added, “I don’t really see the point of growing up.”

Which gets us back to where we started. What if it is true that to be a great artist one must be crazy, or at least strange? 

Or, to get more personal, have I generally failed as a fantasy writer because I am simply too sane, too happy, too rooted in this world?

Clarke's troubles don't seem to have broken her spirit, and she is forging ahead with new plans:

Along with the new novel set in the world of “Strange and Norrell,” Clarke is also working on another book, set partly during the Industrial Revolution in 1840s Bradford, where she lived as a child. Clarke described it as an “anti-horror” novel, with a fantastical premise that reflects her belief that something sublime is hidden within the mundane.

Clarke is still drawn to the idea of magic. For her, magic isn’t something otherworldly and distant, it’s “the idea of something elemental, something transcendent” that exists all around us.

“I feel very strongly that if you could see the world as it really is, if you could get further beyond your ego and the sorts of ways in which we trap ourselves, if you could just see the world beyond, every moment would be miraculous,” she said.

She’s come to believe that the limitations imposed by her illness haven’t made her any less of a writer. She’s a different writer now, but no less ambitious or inventive.

“Somebody said to me, pray the way you can and not the way you think you’re supposed to, and I think it’s the same for writing: Write the way you can and not the way you think you’re supposed to,” Clarke said. “I’ve only ever had any success by doing my own weird thing, following the path that’s in front of me.”

Links 25 October 2024

David Roberts, A Persian Water Wheel in Egypt, 1842

Review of Richard Dawkins' new, very speculative book, The Genetic Book of the Dead.

List of the best posts from rationalist Robin Hanson's years of blogging.

The folks planning to build a new town called Esmerelda in wine country 90 minutes north of San Francisco; they say they are inspired by the nineteenth-century Chataqua movement. Summary on Twitter/X.

New nasal spray vaccines for flu and Covid are performing better than injections in current trials.

More development proposed along DC's Anacostia waterfront; I have had a small part in transforming this area from urban wasteland to thriving community.

Good NY Times article on why Roman concrete has proved so durable. One of the theories discussed is the same one I linked to last year, that the nodules of lime in the mix make the resulting concrete self-healing, and so the presence of those undissolved lumps was intentional. But there are other theories, including some that focus on chemical reactions involving volcanic ash.

Kevin Drum looks into Elon Musks' compaints about environmental regulators.

It is possible to die from being impaled by a swordfish.

Production of Shakespeare's plays is declining in America. But is that really news, or is it more remarkable that in an environment generally hostile to European history, and particularly hostile to some of Shakespeare's themes, there were still 40 professional productions of his plays over the past year?

Nobel Prize in chemistry awared to the people who designed AI systems for understanding protein folding and devising new proteins with a desired shape. (Press Release, New York Times, 12-minute video)

Ben Pentreath sells his old country house in Dorset, with the amazing garden I have featured here several times over the years, and moves to a historic house in Orkney with "so much potential." Farewell tea at his old house here.

Sabine Hossenfelder takes a look at computer scientist Stephen Wolfram's attempt to create a "theory of everything" using hypergraphs, finds it intriguing, 10-minute video.

Lidar mapping of two medieval cities in Uzbekistan. Both on mountaintops, because central Asia was a dangerous place back then.

A small but lavishly decorated house uncovered in Pompeii. To me one of the most important things we learn from Pompeii is how brightly colored the ancient world was, not just temples and villas but streetcorner restaurants and ordinary homes.

Paul Bloom says you should only believe findings in social science when they contradict the ideology of the people doing or publishing the study.

Investigating the fruit in Renaissance paintings, with an eye toward recovering lost or nearly lost varieties.

The essay as a work of architecture, which needs an impressive entrance to draw you in.

Scott Siskind at the Progress Studies Conference.

Kevin Drum is puzzled by the conflicting stories about shoplifting in the US. How bad a problem is it? and is it getting worse or better?

Michael Horowitz in Foreign Affairs: "One report suggests the [Iranian] strike [on Israel] cost about $80 million to launch but $1 billion to defend against. A wealthy country and its allies could afford that sort of expense a few times—but maybe not 20 times, 30 times, or 100 times." Twitter/X

Some Data on the Satisfaction of Trans Teenagers

Via Kevin Drum, here's a fairly large study of teenagers who received "gender affirming" care and mostly felt good about it; of 220 subjects, only 9 expressed regret.

Which is interesting, and this looks like a pretty good study. But:

The sample in the present work was unique in a few ways that are notable for interpretation of these results. Most showed signs of their transgender identity by 4 years of age. On average, they socially transitioned at age 6.7 years, and most were fairly binary in their gender identities and gender expressions throughout childhood. Early-identifying youth who are especially insistent about their identities are also more likely to socially transition in childhood and identify as transgender or continue to show gender dysphoria in adolescence and early adulthood.

Right. This study says nothing about the strange recent surge in "sudden onset gender dysphoria", those teenagers who suddenly have doubts about their genders as puberty kicks in, and who have remarkable levels of other mental health problems. It also only concerns strict gender switchers and says nothing about the non-binary or the gender-fluid.

I mention this partly because I keep meeting older liberals who think they are pro-trans but whose model only concerns people like the subjects of this study, those who have identified strongly since childhood with the gender that doesn't match their biology. When I say to them, ok, but that's not what most trans discourse is about these days, now we have people who think they can change their minds about their genders at any point and should be able to switch back and forth whenever they feel like it, they often react by saying, "That's not trans!"

As I have said here several times, I try not to care about what other adults do; none of my business, really, and I am perfectly willing to be respectful to anyone who is respectful to me. And I don't have any real issues with the kind of children covered by this study. But that doesn't mean there are no questions to ask about the trans movement as currently constructed, particulary on the subject of teenagers with mental health issues, quite a few of whom have sued the people who, as they now see it, responded to their adolescent mental health crises by encouraging them to transition.

But my real beef with trans activists is their habit of insisting "you should think X," to which my response is always, "no." What I think is nobody else's business, and I refuse to engage with anyone who says otherwise.

October

So here I am in Catonsville, watching two weeks of absolutely perfect weather pass by while I wait for the permit to start six weeks of fieldwork that will now stretch into mid December and possibly into January, when we will shiver and curse that we were stuck inside now. Sigh.

Turtle meeting.

Russia will not Accept Peace with Ukraine

Chatham House report:

Many Ukrainians fear not just a long war, but a potentially ‘endless’ war. As the Russian historian Sergei Medvedev has observed, Russia finally found its ultimate national idea after a search lasting three decades – since the collapse of the USSR – and that idea is war.

For today’s Russian authorities, war is a tool for preserving the cohesion of society and ensuring the legitimacy of their rule even if this requires increased repression. However, although the Putin regime is brittle like most personal autocracies that lack reliable mechanisms for succession, the country appears far from a situation comparable to 1917 when war weakened Tsar Nicolas II’s grip on power and made revolution unstoppable. On the surface, Russia appears both equipped and motivated to continue the war for several years if necessary. . . .

While Vladimir Putin controls the levers of power, it is difficult to see a recalibration of Moscow’s strategic goals in Ukraine. He has committed Russia to expanding its territorial gains in Donbas, ‘demilitarizing’ Ukraine, changing the country’s leadership (denazification) and forcing it to accept neutrality. The goal is the full abolition of Ukrainian sovereignty.

Ukraine is not Finland in 1939. On the contrary, it is viewed by wide sections of Russian society as an inalienable part of the country’s identity as a European power and, therefore, as synonymous with Russia. For the Russian elites as well as the public, settling for less than Ukraine’s surrender would not amount to victory and could call into question the huge price paid by the country in terms of human and economic losses and the damage to its reputation.

I share this outlook. It is difficult to imagine any peace amounting to more than a cease fire as long as Putin is in power. He has committed everything – his personal power and prestige, and the resources and even the identity of Russia – to conquering Ukraine. All we can do is surrender to this evil or help Ukraine fight.

Désenchantée

So YouTube randomly offered me a French pop song, "Désenchantée" by Mylène Farmer. Curious, I listened. It's an ok song, and Farmer is obviously a star-level performer. The choreographer of the dancers, is, alas, truly horrendous, some real Eurovision-level tripe. 

The video is shot in a stadium full of screaming fans. Farmer sings the song once, then walks out into the audience and has them sing it back to her; thousands of these people know the song by heart.

I can read French, sort of, but my oral comprehension is terrible. So I looked up the lyrics. As you would expect from a song called "Disenchanted," they are pretty grim. 

Swimming in the troubled waters of tomorrows
Waiting here for the end
Floating in the air too heavy
Of almost nothing
Who can I reach out to?

If I have to fall from a great height
May my fall be slow
I have found no rest
Except in indifference
However, I would like to find innocence again
But nothing makes sense, and nothing is going well

Everything is chaos next to it
All my ideals: damaged words
I am looking for a soul who can help me
I am from a disenchanted, disenchanted generation

There is a second verse, then he chorus again, and then 

Chaos, chaos, chaos
Chaos, chaos, chaos

But, look around the stadium at the people belting out these words; does anybody look sad? No, they look like this is at least the best day of the month for them, if not the whole year.

It struck that this one of the themes of modern culture: nothing makes people feel as good as singing along with up tempo songs about the collapse of civilization and the misery of existence.

Links 18 October 2024

Tamara de Lempicka, Portrait of a Man, 1928

Recruiting bank robbers on Instagram turned out to be a bad idea.

Supreme Court wades into the case of a man arrested for "being an asshole."

Bonkers experiment shows that bumblebee queens prefer to dig their winter burrows in soil contaminated with pesticides. (NY Times, original paper)

This week's past post is Questioning Everything, from 2017.

Asahi Shinbun says there is a shortage of animators in Japan, for which the main cause is low wages, for which the main cause is that the company doing the animation can get as little as 6 percent of the income from a film or tv series.

Anybody want your own small New England college for $5.5 million? What a fantasy.

Burial site in France used for 800 years provides more evidence that Neolithic Europeans were patrilineal and patrilocal, since these 37 majority male skeletons are mostly from the same male lineage.

Clay seals from Bronze Age Iran.

Exploring a 3D scan of Shackleton's ship Endurance.

Major study from Apple on the reasoning probems of LLMs. (Study, summary article, shorter summary on Twitter/X) "There is just no way you can build reliable agents on this foundation, where changing a word or two in irrelevant ways or adding a few bit of irrelevant info can give you a different answer."

More discourse today around the subject of felons voting, with the idea that letting felons vote helps Democrats. But that is false; a majority of felons are white men, and like other white men they generally vote Republican. That's in a normal year; I bet Trump gets a higher than usual share of the felon vote. 

Why kids should read obituaries. Via Marginal Revolution.

Sabine Hossenfelder on the status of quantum computing, 7-minute video.

Political polarization in Silicon Valley. (Twitter/X) After giving most of the political contributions to Democrats in 2004-2020, they now split pretty evenly between the parties. I think this is entirely a reaction against woke excesses.

Matt Yglesias: "Every faction of MAGA leverages the fact that their champion is a notorious liar to convince themselves that he is secretly on their side about everything when all he’s ever done across his career is betray people and enrich himself."

A claim that hominids called Homo naledi buried their dead 200,000 years ago, but note that this project is controversial and many anthropologists don't even accept Homo naledi as a distinct species.

Kevin Drum on why the inflation of recent years has felt worse to consumers than the data suggests.

Australian study of "critical technologies": "These new results reveal the stunning shift in research leadership over the past two decades towards large economies in the Indo-Pacific, led by China’s exceptional gains. The US led in 60 of 64 technologies in the five years from 2003 to 2007, but in the most recent five years (2019–2023) is leading in seven. China led in just three of 64 technologies in 2003–20074 but is now the lead country in 57 of 64 technologies in 2019–2023, increasing its lead from our rankings last year (2018–2022), where it was leading in 52 technologies."

The most famous book from 16th-century Mexico, La Historia General de las Cosas de Nueva España, compiled by Bernardino de Sahagún and a bunch of Native assistants, has now been put online by the Getty in an amazing, searchable version. 

The global "wind phone" movement.

Friedrich Merz, leader of Germany's Christian Democratic Party, says he would give Russia at 24 hour ultimatum to stop bombing civilian infrastructure in Ukraine. If it does not stop, he would provide Taurus cruise missiles to Ukraine with no restrictions on targeting. Quotes Montaigne: "fear is the mother of all cruelty."

Dumb Discourse about the Power of Wokeness

Matt Yglesias explains what's wrong with the conservative reaction to wokeness. A few years ago in the George Floyd era leftists attacked Hamilton for glorifying our racist found fathers. Lin Manuel Miranda responded with a comment something like, "They have a point." And now to this week:

Hamilton was killed in the woke fervor of the George Floyd and 1619 Project era. Nothing that painted the American Founding as flawed-but-ultimately-good was allowed to survive.

But, as Yglesias says:

No, this is what’s so crazy about this discourse — Hamilton is currently playing on Broadway and in London, their North America tour is in Denver right now and opening Philadelphia soon, international tours are playing Sydney & Dublin.

Conservatives vastly overrate the power of woke culture outside its academic home, which causes them to embrace all sorts of wickedness so long as it is anti-woke, and to think of politicians who oppose it as heroes, when every Republican politican in America only gains votes from such a stand.

The real problem in America is hysteria: hysterical beliefs about economic and social collapse, hysterical fear of the other party, hysterical fear of immigrants, hysterical fear of censorship, hysterical fear of the government. What I long for right now is for a conservative leader to come forward and proclaim, like Taft, a return to normalcy.

Ambition, Rationalism, and Something Else

Interesting personal narrative by Nabeel Qureshia, a very ambitious young man who went to work for Palantir. (I was able to access this via Marginal Revolution.) He makes it seem cool, people working extreme hours partly because they find what they are doing fascinating and important. "These were seriously intense, competitive people who wanted to win, true believers; weird, fascinating people who read philosophy in their spare time, went on weird diets, and did 100-mile bike rides for fun." One of the people who interviewed him had the temperature in his office set to 60 degrees and constantly chewed ice, because of some theory that this improves cognitive function.

The combo of intellectual grandiosity and intense competitiveness was a perfect fit for me. It’s still hard to find today, in fact – many people have copied the ‘hardcore’ working culture and the ‘this is the Marines’ vibe, but few have the intellectual atmosphere, the sense of being involved in a rich set of ideas. This is hard to LARP – your founders and early employees have to be genuinely interesting intellectual thinkers. The main companies that come to mind which have nailed this combination today are OpenAI and Anthropic. It’s no surprise they’re talent magnets. . . .

The overall ‘vibe’ of the company was more of a messianic cult than a normal software company. But importantly, it seemed that criticism was highly tolerated and welcomed – one person showed me an email chain where an entry-level software engineer was having an open, contentious argument with a Director of the company with the entire company (around a thousand people) cc’d. As a rationalist-brained philosophy graduate, this particular point was deeply important to me – I wasn’t interested in joining an uncritical cult. But a cult of skeptical people who cared deeply and wanted to argue about where the world was going and how software fit into it – existentially – that was interesting to me.

I am fascinated by the kind of intellect represented here. On the one hand, these people are really smart, and they get rich by building cool things. But I always come away thinking that something is lacking. Here is another insight that feeds into my disquiet:

One of my favorite insights from Tyler Cowen’s book Talent is that the most talented people tend to develop their own vocabularies and memes, and these serve as entry points to a whole intellectual world constructed by that person. Tyler himself is of course a great example of this. Any MR reader can name 10+ Tylerisms instantly - ‘model this’, ‘context is that which is scarce’, ‘solve for the equilibrium’, ‘the great stagnation’ are all examples. You can find others who are great at this. Thiel is one. Elon is another (“multiplanetary species”, “preserving the light of consciousness”, etc. are all memes). Trump, Yudkowsky, gwern, SSC, Paul Graham, all of them regularly coin memes. It turns out that this is a good proxy for impact.

Maybe that's true. Mulling over some other major thinkers, it seems to me that Jesus and Confucius both had this talent for generating impressive "memes." So did Karl Marx and Thomas Jefferson. But is it enough?

Enough for what?

Enough for human flourishing.

I have mentioned here several times that brilliant scientists have a terrible record when it comes to politics. Elon Musk's public self-humiliation seems to me only the latest example of what happens when a person who is brilliant in some technical ways tries to pontificate about something really complex and important, e.g., free speech, or politics. And I don't just mean because he supports Trump, I mean his descent into utter incoherence. To maintain a political position that has ideological content but also deals with reality is, it seems, very difficult, and being smart is not enough to get your there.

But there is more to the rationalist tech-bro thing that one might worry about. For example, the weakness for dumb fads in diet and medicine; the constant search for nootropic drugs that would make them smarter or harder working; the insistence on condensing a thinker like Nietzsche into a meme like "good things are good."

Sometimes, being smart is enough; sometimes great knowledge of the past can be an impediment rather than an advantage. Mathematicians and poets often do their best work before they turn 30.

But in other circumstances shallow brilliance is at best inadequate and perhaps destructive. Sometimes a mind racing forward in a nootropic haze leaves behind all that vague stuff that goes by names like roots and meaning and connection. Hi tech success may be all that some people want or need, but I see the world differently and want a different kind of life.

At the University of Michigan, DEI Satisfies No One

By some measures, the University of Michigan has the most comprehensive program for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in the US. But even though the school has spent, by its own reckoning, $250 million on DEI efforts, NY Times reporter Nicholas Confessore found that nobody is satisfied. 

Princess-J’Maria Mboup, the speaker of the university’s Black Student Union, told me that “the students that are most affected by D.E.I. — meaning marginalized communities — are invested in the work, but not in D.E.I. itself.” Mboup called Michigan’s efforts “superficial.” For all their spread and reach, she told me, the school’s D.E.I. programs betrayed “a general discomfort with naming Blackness explicitly.”

Her discontent reflected a tension I found threaded throughout D.E.I. at Michigan, a pervasive uncertainty around whom — and what — D.E.I. is really for. Like most schools, Michigan officially celebrates diversity of every kind and inclusion for all; the school’s own definition of D.E.I., which cites 13 distinct kinds of identity, is as sprawling as the university itself. On campus, I met students with a wide range of backgrounds and perspectives. Not one expressed any particular enthusiasm for Michigan’s D.E.I. initiative. Where some found it shallow, others found it stifling. They rolled their eyes at the profusion of course offerings that revolve around identity and oppression, the D.E.I.-themed emails they frequently received but rarely read.

Michigan’s own data suggests that in striving to become more diverse and equitable, the school has also become less inclusive: In a survey released in late 2022, students and faculty members reported a less positive campus climate than at the program’s start and less of a sense of belonging. Students were less likely to interact with people of a different race or religion or with different politics — the exact kind of engagement D.E.I. programs, in theory, are meant to foster.

Instead, Michigan’s D.E.I. efforts have created a powerful conceptual framework for student and faculty grievances — and formidable bureaucratic mechanisms to pursue them. Everyday campus complaints and academic disagreements, professors and students told me, were now cast as crises of inclusion and harm, each demanding some further administrative intervention or expansion. On a campus consumed with institutional self-criticism, seemingly the only thing to avoid a true reckoning was D.E.I. itself.

Professors and administrators who spoke critically of the program insisted on anonymity, because, as one administrator (a “woman of color”) put it, “no one can criticize the D.E.&I. program — not its scale, its dominance.”

The one measurable outcome of the program has been a rise in disputes:

The conflicts over inclusion were not limited to petitions and tweets. Increasingly, students and professors were turning to more formal remedies. In 2015, the university office charged with enforcing federal civil rights mandates like Title IX received about 200 complaints of sex- or gender-based misconduct on Michigan’s campus. By 2020, that number had more than doubled. Last year, it surpassed 500. Complaints involving race, religion or national origin increased to almost 400 from a few dozen during roughly the same period. (The office itself has nearly quadrupled in size in recent years.)

Then came October 7 and campus disputes in which both sides accused the other of racism and the DEI bureaucracy did exactly nothing to smooth things over or promote dialogue.

It's a sad tale of bureaucratic overreach and the deep truth that sometimes “fighting” what you hate is pointless or worse.

Border Theater

Via Kevin Drum, a great article by Jack Herrera in Texas Monthly about the US southern border and why current policies will never stop the flow of migrants:

The current border crisis is a symptom of a much deeper transformation in the U.S. and across much of the Western Hemisphere. It won’t be solved by tough-talking politicians posing next to coils of razor wire. There are greater forces at play.

One of those forces is the worsening economic and political calamity across much of Latin America and the Caribbean. Violence committed by gangs and corrupt cops in Marco’s native Honduras—and in Ecuador, Haiti, Mexico, and Venezuela—has also driven tens of thousands northward. But arguably the most important factor—one too rarely considered—is the interplay of supply and demand. In 2021, as the pandemic began to ease, “We’re Hiring” signs started to appear in the windows of businesses across the U.S. Acute labor shortages hobbled entire industries, interrupting supply chains and fueling inflation. In response, a record number of workers crossed the southern border.

Many industries have slowly recovered from the COVID-era labor crisis. Economists generally agree that the surge in immigration played a huge role in that recovery. But across the country, employers still say they can’t fill vacancies, even as some have increased wages to varying degrees. “America is facing a worker shortage crisis: There are too many open jobs without people to fill them,” the U.S. Chamber of Commerce warned in September. According to the chamber, Texas has just eighty workers for every hundred open jobs.

The deficit in construction is historic, by some measures. Associated Builders and Contractors, a trade association, reported that in 2022 the industry averaged more job openings per month than it had ever recorded. Texas building executives are speaking in apocalyptic terms about the labor shortage they’re still facing. Behind closed doors, they bluntly acknowledge that countless new projects won’t get off the ground unless they hire workers who are in the country illegally.

Of course the construction industry could raise wages and hope to recruit more of the native born, but that would not be a simple fix. They have gotten used to relying on cheap migrant labor and have been setting their prices accordingly; having to raise wages suddenly would pinch them hard when they are often tied into multi-year contracts. Also, fewer and fewer native born Americans are going into construction. I remember discussing this with my sons. My brother and I both did some construction in our youths, but none of my sons have. When I asked them about it, they waved off the idea; they simply don't regard it as work people like them do. Herrera says that across the rich nations of the world, "the children of accountants and schoolteachers don’t seem to want to lay bricks, even if laying bricks were to pay better than accounting and teaching." So for the construction industry,

Cutting off the supply of undocumented workers would be like cutting off the supply of concrete and lumber. Far fewer homes and businesses would be built in the next few decades. It would push up the prices paid by those who buy homes and office buildings. So an inviolable relationship has developed between new construction and migrants: If you build, they will come.

Whenever Texas politicians threaten to pass laws that would make it harder for businesses to employ undocumented workers, phones in the Capitol start ringing. Stuck with the need to show their base that they’re cracking down on migrants, politicians, including Abbott, have instead found a middle ground: They keep up their bombast regarding the border, but they avoid stringing any razor wire between undocumented immigrants and jobs in the state’s interior.

The Texas economy is booming largely because of affordable housing, and new housing is being built in Texas at a remarkable rate thanks largely to the state's 1.6 million undocumented workers; one recent survey of construction sites in the state found that 50 percent of workers were undocumented.

So the measures that would really end illegal migration – nationwide eVerify, and real penalties for employers who hire the undocumented – will never be put in place, and the migrant flows will continue, despite all the sound and fury of "border theater."

NASA's Europa Clipper

NASA's Europa Clipper launched yesterday on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket; it is due to arrive at Jupiter in 2030.

The point is to search for signs of life at Jupiter's moon Europa. Europa has an icy crust that is regularly remade and smoothed over, which means there is a big ocean of water underneath it. Electromagnetic studies show that the ocean is salty. There is also plenty of energy, in the form of tidal stresses and Jupiter's intense electromagnetic environment. So, a plausible place to look for life.

On the down side, those same electromagnetic fields would rapidly tear apart many of our key molecules, such as DNA and RNA. So Europan life would have to be quite different from ours. Which is, to me, part of the appeal: I tend to think that the first time we find alien life it will be so strange to us that we will have trouble deciding if it is alive or not.

The Europa Clipper won't drill down to that buried ocean. Instead it will repeatedly fly by the moon's surface, scanning it with a variety of instruments and scooping molecules out of its extremely thin atmosphere to study. We know that Saturn's moon Enceladus sometimes erupts with great jets of water from its subsurface ocean, and while we aren't certain that happens at Europa there is some evidence for it, and NASA is hoping to observe such a plume and fly the Clipper through it.

I am not optimistic that life will be found, but I think the search is worth trying; certainly the chance is higher than on Mars. And even if we don't find life, perhaps we will learn more about these strange worlds and their vast, dark oceans.

Disaster Recovery in the Trump Era

CNN Reports:

Aid to several communities impacted by Hurricane Helene was temporarily paused in parts of North Carolina over the weekend due to reports of threats against Federal Emergency Management Agency responders, amid a backdrop of misinformation about responses to recent storms.

Some FEMA teams helping disaster survivors apply for assistance in rural North Carolina are currently working at secure disaster recovery centers in counties where federal workers are receiving threats, a FEMA spokesperson told CNN on Monday.

“For the safety of our dedicated staff and the disaster survivors we are helping, FEMA has made some operational adjustments,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “Disaster Recovery Centers will continue to be open as scheduled, survivors continue to register for assistance, and we continue to help the people of North Carolina with their recovery.”

On Saturday, FEMA workers had to halt their work in Rutherford County due to reports that National Guard troops saw “armed militia” threatening the workers, according to the Washington Post, which cited an email to federal agencies helping with the response, verified by unnamed federal officials. It’s not clear if the threat was credible.

Rutherford County is southeast of the hard-hit Asheville area, and part of the mountainous region that was slammed by deadly flooding and landslides as Helene carved a path of destruction through the Southeast after making landfall in Florida last month. More than 100 people were killed in North Carolina and thousands of others were left grappling with catastrophic damage.

Some FEMA operations were also paused Sunday in Ashe County, near the borders of Tennessee and Virginia, out of an abundance of caution, Sheriff B. Phil Howell said on Facebook. This included in-person applications for aid in at least two locations “due to threats occurring in some counties,” according to the county’s emergency management office. Those locations reopened Monday, the sheriff and emergency management office announced.

Strange times. Note that I am not assuming the threats are real, just noting level of paranoia, with recovery operations trapped between people who think FEMA is the enemy and people terrified of anti-government militias.

My Favorite Books of the Century

Fiction

1. Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall
2. Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies
3. Susanna Clarke, Piranesi
4. Pascal Mercier, The Night Train to Lisbon
5. Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow
6. Roberto Bolaño, 2666 (Review to come soon)
7. Neal Stephenson, Anathem
8. Marlon James, The Book of the Night Women
9. Anna Burns, Milkman
10. Daniel Kehlman, Tyll

Non-Fiction

1. Jenny Uglow, The Lunar Men
2. Charles Mann, 1491
3. Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire
4. Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns
5. Robin Fleming, Britain after Rome
6. Peter Hessler, River Town
7. Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus
8. J.E. Lendon, Song of Wrath
9. Louis Warren, God's Red Son
10. Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club

It makes me a little sad that there no medieval history on this list; in fact I can't remember the last work of medieval history I read that excited me.

Neal Stephenson, "Anathem"

Another review from my old web site:

Neal Stephenson, Anathem. New York: William Morrow, 2008.

The leading literary spokesman for the technogeek class is back with another very long, very interesting book. I read all 890 pages in less than two weeks, which, considering that I have five children and a job, implies a pretty high degree of focus. I think it’s great.

Anathem is set on a planet much like the earth. The 18-year-old narrator and the other main characters inhabit the Concent of Saunt Edhar, a sort of monastery for mathematicians and philosophers – “saunt,” we are told, is a shortened form of “savant.” In this world the scientific elite is separated from the general population and forbidden to use computers or most other technology. Unable to do experiments, they devote themselves to “theorics,” which means mostly higher math, astronomy, and the philosophy that undergirds them. They have an elaborate ritual life and have raised their music, which is much like the chanting and singing of monks, to a high art. They grow their own food and manage their own affairs. The avout, as these mathematical monks are called, are divided into four classes, based on how frequently they interact with the secular world. The Unarians open their doors once every year, the Decenarians once every ten, the Centennarians once a century, and the Millenarians once a thousand.

The complex, 3000-year relationship between the secular and “mathic” worlds is laid out in some detail (you can give a lot of background in 890 pages). It seems that 700 years or so before our story civilization had grown wealthy and technologically advanced but destroyed itself through war and ecological disaster. Much of the blame was placed on the scientists who created the superweapons used in these wars, so they were banished to their “maths” and the separation between the two worlds was rigidly enforced. Since then the secular world has been relatively peaceful but technologically and economically stagnant, while the mathic world has gotten caught up in abstruse and unresolvable philosophical debates.

Much of Anathem moves quite slowly. The plot doesn’t really get going until page 250 or so, and after that there are more long patches in which very little happens. I kept reading because I found the world fascinating and because the characters talk about interesting things. Stephenson’s world is full of marvelous details. He has developed an extensive vocabulary that helps make the world feel different from earth despite the similarities. Data is “givens,” videos are called “speelies,” and video cameras are “speelycaptors.” The sociology is particularly interesting, such as the ways different seculars feel about the avout. Some consider the avout useless fuddy-duddies, some think they are evil sorcerers, some think they have special contact with god. I never minded that little was happening, because for me just exploring this world was enough.

The plot, once it gets going, it pretty interesting. I’m not going to say anything about it, because it relies on surprises I don’t want to spoil and because it isn’t really the main point of the book anyway. The most important section of the book, I thought, was a hundred-page-long discussion revolving around the speculation that the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics explains consciousness. The plot follows out certain very far-fetched real-world consequences of this idea. I don't happen to think that this view of the world is correct, but, hey, this is what science fiction is about: what might happen if this crazy but possible scientific notion were true? Stephenson shows himself to be a master of this kind of writing.

The many worlds interpretation grew out of the frustration physicists have felt when they try to connect the mathematics of particle physics to a logical narrative of what is happening in the world. Quantum physics gives no absolute account of where things are or what state they are in, just probabilities. An electron might be just about anywhere in the universe; in quantum mechanics it doesn’t have a location, just a sort of cloud of probability. Nor is this just the vagueness of a guess. In some kinds of experiments the electron seems to be smeared out in space, for example, passing simultaneously through two holes in a screen. In other cases an electron seems to be in two places at once, or to have two different spin states at the same time. But if you look for the electron, for example by bouncing an x-ray off it, it has a definite location. What happens to the probability cloud that it appeared to be a millisecond before?

Nobody knows. Textbooks say that the wave function of the electron, which describes that smeared-out probability cloud, has “collapsed” to one point. As I understand it, nobody has been able to model this collapse in a rigorous mathematical way, and physicists have grown increasingly uncomfortable with the textbook description. So they have tried some very weird ways to make sense of the quantum world. The many worlds interpretation asserts that, in fact, every possible outcome does happen. Every time someone measures the spin state of an electron or measures its exact location, the world divides into many worlds, with each possible outcome happening in one of those worlds. The many worlds interpretation has some obvious problems. First of all, it seems impossible almost by definition to ever prove that it is true or false, which according to the standard definition means that it isn’t really science. There is also the Schroedinger’s cat problem: what kind of event triggers the division of the cosmos into different “world tracks”? And what about probability? What does it mean to say that one outcome is more likely than another if, in fact, every possible outcome does happen? But for Neal Stephenson’s purposes as an author, and ours as readers, it is enough that a great many scientists find the idea intriguing.

I had never before encountered the connection between the many worlds interpretation and consciousness, but since it seems, once you hear it, rather obvious, I assume that Stephenson didn’t invent the model he proposes. (One of his characters notes that people have been speculating on these topics for a thousand years.) The idea goes something like this: one way to define consciousness is to think of it as the ability to hold different models of the future in our minds at the same time. When we think about what to do, we imagine the consequences of different actions. We also think about the past, wondering how things might be different if we had made different choices. In the terms sometimes used by physicists, we are holding in our minds separate world tracks; as some philosophers have put it, we live extended in time. Recall that it is possible for subatomic particles to be, or at least to appear to be, in two different states at the same time. Such a particle exists simultaneously in two separate world tracks. This is the property that would be taken advantage of by quantum computers, should they ever be created: a transistor that can be in two states at once can do a lot more work than one that has to be in one state or the other. What if, this speculation proceeds, our brains work that way? If we hold different models of the future in our minds using the quantum properties of electrons in our brains? Why, then we are quantum computers, and our brains are able to travel some distance along parallel world tracks, existing for at least a short time in multiple universes. This ability to exist simultaneously in parallel universes defines consciousness, or at least is a key part of it, and it makes our minds fundamentally different from ordinary computers.

Whatever you think of this model, in Stephenson’s hands it makes for some fascinating conversation among his characters and some wonderfully bizarre happenings. (Suppose there were people who learned to travel along separate world tracks for more than the microseconds that most of us can, perhaps for hours or days; might not this ability to follow out the consequences of actions until they become clear before choosing one seem like a kind of sorcery?) If you think you might like reading a novel that mixes conversations on such matters with some intense action and the exploration of a very cleverly imagined world, run out and get a copy of Anathem. If not, well, read something else.

One of the things I find most interesting about Stephenson as a writer is that he so clearly defines himself as a particular kind of person, writing for those like himself. He knows a lot about digital technology and something about math, and he looks down on those who don’t. Government comes across as a sort of conspiracy set up by those without technical knowledge to control those who do, and to take some of the wealth they create and distribute it to people who have done nothing to deserve it. Stephenson’s bestselling book so far, Cryptonomicon, features a lot of straight out anarcho-libertarian fantasy. Characters live in fortified compounds on lightly governed islands, their privacy protected from government snooping by strong cryptography, their money shielded from taxation in a completely secret international internet bank. Government agents and especially lawyers appear as irrational, power-mad goons. Brilliant codebreakers exploit the ignorance of their military bosses to carry out their own diplomatic policies, along the way making fools of those same bosses with practical jokes that the generals never even understand.

Compared to the world of Cryptonomicon, Stephenson’s new world shows some of the same tendencies, but in a more nuanced way. It seems less juvenile, less like the sort of thing dreamed up by a 20-year-old fan of Ayn Rand. Since it is presented in a more grown-up and serious way, it seems fair to treat the philosophy espoused here seriously, and to ask whether it has any value.

Stephenson puts a very high value on rational, scientific thought. In Anathem he allows some value to poetry, but in all his books he heaps abuse on religion. In one of my favorite moments in Anathem, the narrator has a discussion with a religious believer about Saunt Bly, a famous character who, centuries before, had left his math and ended up as the focus of a religious cult. The “deolater” says that he believes that Saunt Bly was expelled from the concent because he proved the existence of god. “That’s interesting,” says the narrator, “because what would really happen is that we would say ‘nice proof, Bly’ and start believing in god.” At a wedding, the deolater preacher gave “one of his exasperating sermons, filled with wisdom and upsight and human truths, fettered to a cosmographic scheme that had bee blown out of the water four thousand years ago.” It was nice to see that Stephenson has created some interesting god-believing characters who come across as generally positive, but in the end they still suffer from that silly weakness, the inability to think in a rational and rigorous way.

The secular powers get a similar treatment. Some individual politicians are educated and sensible, and individual soldiers come across as decent guys who are very useful in an emergency, but on the whole government is a deeply frivolous enterprise. The leading avout understand the world so much more profoundly than the “panjandrums” that the notion of their following secular orders is a joke. Even the 18-year-old narrator is wiser than the political class.

I have nothing against intelligence and education, and I am myself a big fan of rational, scientific thought. But that is far different from the claim that the technical elite should rule the world. Stephenson seems to think that there is nothing to government but intelligence and rationality. I was reminded of the claim, made by the King of the Brobdignacians in Gulliver’s Travels, that there is nothing to government but goodness and common sense. But it simply is not true that scientists, even the greatest, have any special wisdom when it comes to politics. George Orwell, confronted by the claim that a more scientific education would make the English better citizens, asked why, if that was so, so many scientists of the 1920s and 1930s became communists and Nazis. In fact, over the past century highly educated, philosophically minded people have been drawn to radical politics in much greater numbers than the populace at large. (Communists, racists, John Birchers, etc.)  Here’s a question to ponder: which group, scientists or ministers, has been a more important force for political good in America?

I would say that Stephenson’s own politics disprove his notion that the elite has more wisdom than the masses. Of all the competing political philosophies in the world, I think libertarianism is the stupidest. We cannot survive without government. Even Stalinism, for all its horrors, managed to work for a while. Libertarianism would never work at all. We could certainly get by with a lot less government than we have now, and I am attracted to libertarian positions on several issues. But the notion that we could get by without a strong state is simply nonsensical. Too see what would happen, you have only to look at what happened in Europe when the Roman Empire collapsed. The economy collapsed with it, the population cratered, and the survivors mostly ended up as serfs of powerful lords or great churches. Without a government stronger than the corporations, we would all end up as the serfs of corporate masters, or of individual billionaires.

Yeah, ok, it’s a novel, and I am once again indulging my habit of taking everything too seriously. But it’s Neal Stephenson’s own fault. By incorporating so much fascinating, high-level discussion of ideas into this terrific book, he has put me in a reflective, thoughtful frame of mind. How many entertaining books can do that?

October 26, 2008